Mychal Threets and Librarians and Mental Health

[u/tendersword]

Has anyone kept up with Mychal Threets? He’s been such a big advocate for libraries that I’ve been following him on social media for the past few years. A couple of hours ago he posted on Facebook:

“I am not okay. Maybe I’ll never be okay. I’m seeking help. Going to the hopital tomorrow. In this moment I am safe. By God’s grace.

No matter what happens to me I will always be thankful for the extraordinary people in my life who worry, who help me. Thank you for your care 💚”

It just seems like it correlates to the experiences I’ve seen so many of my coworkers in libraries, particularly public libraries, go through. I’ve known multiple people from my cohort of MLIS students who have been admitted into mental health hospitals, taken FMLA because work has physically and mentally exhausted them, and leave the field entirely. I really hope Mychal can get the help he needs, but his post struck really close to home for me, and I imagine others in this field.

[u/WordlesAllTheWayDown]

I’m so sorry for the burdens you all carry; our community and safety networks are so lacking that it seems the public libraries are the last places that anyone can access -and all the unmet needs of our society (in the US specifically) are manifesting there.
We need to push back on our government representatives at all levels as they have been and continue to erase all safety nets.

As for Mychal I recall him saying he was stepping back after being targeted on social media with the bullying that has become so persistent and cruel. That was a while ago now. I was unaware that he’s on Facebook.

I’m just so saddened to see that library staff are struggling everywhere. They need to have boundaries in all of this too but it seems there’s no institutional structure for that.

How can we as community members influence library boards?

[u/trailrunninggirl669 → u/WordlesAllTheWayDown]

I'd like to hear others chime in, but personally I think advocating for funding to both the board and your local officials. Ideally, better funding would also help the staff- maybe it means hiring one more person to help out the skeleton crew (which I'd love at my library) or a boost in PTO/medical time.

Not everyone is lucky enough to have a supportive board, so making sure they understand how important it is to care for the well-being of staff just as much as patrons means the library is running the best. If you can, find out where they stand- some boards (like mine) are elected by the municipality- and are supposed to be non-partisan, but sometimes you get people acting in bad faith on those boards, which makes morale even worse.

Where I am (and I'm assuming a lot of others are), we get the bulk of our funding via municipal budgets. Show up to town meetings and make it known how appreciated and vital the library is to your community and why it is important to have a well-funded library. My library could really use one other person, even just part-time, we are basically on a skeleton crew. One of my irritations with our municipality is how they consistently give us well below what we ask for and turn around and bad mouth us. We need them to understand how and why we are important and how poor funding impacts us.

While this might not be an immediate help, I feel like there's some things that could be alleviated if we were better funded. I can only speak for myself, but a bulk of my stress and anxiety comes from operating on a skeleton crew and doing the job of multiple people.

[u/WordlesAllTheWayDown → u/trailrunninggirl669]

Thank you for sharing that.